Packers might make executables smaller but increase their startup time (e.g when you run them, it takes time to unpack their sections).

In the case of Puppy, it's an extremely bad idea to use UPX. Since Puppy's SFS is compressed, the compression benefit of UPX is gone, so you gain just the slow startup speed (and increased memory usage), without the benefit of small size on-disk.

In the case of PETs (and stuff that isn't part of a compressed file system), you still have those disadvantages.

Also, smaller executables aren't less resource-hungry in many cases. In this case, for example, they're the exact opposite. _________________My homepageMy GitHub profile